Guides are a feature of graphic design that facilitate aligning visual elements (e.g., text or graphic) in a design document. In particular, guides can be used to align visual elements horizontally and/or vertically, independently or in combination with other visual elements within a design document. By way of example only, assume that a designer is creating a web design that includes multiple visual elements; the designer can include individual guides on the design document canvas to align different visual elements of a design document. Typically, to align visual elements, the designer manually moves or drags individual guides, one at a time, adjacent to particular visual elements, and aligns a first visual element along one or more guides. The one or more manually placed guides can also be used to align a second visual element along the one or more guides and, as a result, aligns the two visual elements relative to one another.
Designers can also specifically use four individually placed guides around a primary visual element to align additional visual elements in a graphical design. For example, a designer can drag individual guides adjacent to a visual element, per side of the visual element. As such, for the visual element, a user would drag four guides to each side of the visual element to create a grid of guides, where the grid can be a relative position used to align multiple visual elements. This process of placing guides can at times require zooming into the design document canvas to properly lock each individual guide to each side of the visual element. Even with a snapping feature for guides, where the snapping feature in a design document snaps a guide to a particular visual element, generating guides still requires human-assisted intervention to define guides around a visual element.
A guide can also be positioned in a specific location on a design document based on a ruler of the design document. The ruler, which appears horizontally and/or vertically on the design document stage, has measurement markings (e.g., inches or centimeters) which are used to place individual guides on measured positions on the design document canvas. In this regard, various guides can be manually manipulated by the designer to place the guides in locations of the design document canvas to help align visual elements. Defining guides manually, and also just one guide at a time, can be tedious and time consuming.